Current Projects chat and miscellany

Actually there is a shortage of laughing gas in the world due to the coolant of supercomputer, especially the Hadron Collider.

Laughing gas is Nitrous Oxide, it's easy enough to make since the atmosphere is mostly Nitrogen and Oxygen and combining them is not rocket science*

Coolant for superconducting electromagnets is Helium, which is rare and expensive.

LHC is not a supercomputer, but is does have magnets (how do they work, etc) cooled to 1.9K with liquid Helium

Supercomputers like to be kept cool, but not liquid Helium-cool; ordinary air conditioning refrigerants are used, either directly to cool the cabinet intake air or to chill water which is then used to distribute the cooling to air intake cooling coils. Lowering the minimum temperature too far creates more problems than you need, the key to cooling is to get enough mass flow that coolant minimum temperature is not problematic while maintaining junction temperature at sensible levels, which are around 350K-400K. In my young day, the heat exchanger cold coil was fed from normal chilled water lines at around 280K; judging from the stacks of plant at the back of our local server farms, not much has changed.

*although burning Nitrous Oxide is rocket science